


A House Of Nettles

by Ias



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/F, Power Dynamics, Psychological Horror, Slap Slap Kiss, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 08:23:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6559222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Éowyn is not healed. Inside of her, something hungry lives on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A House Of Nettles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Innin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innin/gifts).



The houses of healing. The balcony of the garden. Stone beneath her hands—yes. She knows these sensations well. She is here. It is real. Éowyn leans over the open void, the wind lashing at her hair, and stares out over a sea of grass.

It is dark and it is still, with no light shining from the west. That strikes her as odd—as wrong, in a way she cannot describe. The sun should rise in the east, she knows, creeping over the mountains that once would have struck her heart with terror. Yet in the west, that awful darkness disturbs her in a way she cannot explain. The night is wiped clean of stars. They have turned their backs on the world tonight. They have all closed their eyes.

She can hear the rustle of wind moving over the Pelennor Fields, a thousand hoarse voices. She stood on that ground not so long ago, churned by thousands of feet into an unspeakable mud. There was no grass left after that onslaught. And yet something down there in the darkness is whispering. Éowyn has never seen the sea, and yet something inside of her recognizes the hiss of the waves, a sound like a gown trailing over sand, like a thousand serpents all slithering over each other at once.

To her eyes, there is nothing—the darkness of the sky is mirrored beneath it, an empty void. And yet she can _see_ , there, in the distance—a different gradient of shadow that rears like the back of an enormous beast, an edge of the horizon ready to fold over and crush her, to fold her into that nothingness until she is a part of it.

She is not afraid.

A band of pure cold sits on her finger.

“My Lady?”

The stars snap back into place. The false ocean is as it should be, a torn and muddy wasteland whose funeral pyres still smolder. Éowyn ’s hand clenches in its sling, and its ring finger is bare.

She turns to the captain of Gondor with a smile she does not feel. “I could not sleep.”

Faramir steps up beside her, staring out over the plains. “I thought for a moment that sleep had found you here.”

She looks at him. He’s a good man, clear to see. She gets the sense when she looks at him of a future she could have had, of something almost there, but not quite. Outlines, shadows. She thinks it entirely possible that she could come to love him.

Something stirs beneath her surface. From the fingertips of her injured hand, a deep and terrible cold spreads out. _A handsome enough cage to bind yourself in._

The voice in Éowyn ’s head is not her own. She turns away, to face the chill of the wind again.

“I merely wished to be alone,” she says, and bowing, Faramir allows her that. A good man, yes. But he cannot save her.

 

It had started not long after they learned of Sauron’s defeat. Something stirring inside of her, a lazy stretch, a yawn. A presence that quickly began testing the boundaries of its cage, a ripple under the water, an unconscious muscle tic. It feels cold and distant, something warped by time and forces that Éowyn herself cannot understand. A similar feeling pierced her breath when her eyes first fell into the sucking hollow blackness behind the slits of the Witch King’s helmet.

But that reason is not how Éowyn knows it is Angmar that clings inside of her still. She knows without reason or understanding. She simply _knows._

There is no Elessar to call her back to herself this time. He will return in victory soon enough, but how long is soon, and how long does Éowyn have? Aragorn has saved her, and left her adrift. She does not resent him this. What burns inside her, a quiet coal of fury, is the knowledge that she needed saving in the first place.

Not this time. This time, she will save herself.

Éowyn can feel it from the moment she closes her eyes. It builds like a pressure in her hand, as if the blood has stopped flowing and grown heavy, turgid—it spreads up her arm, up her shoulder, her neck. It settles thickly behind her eyes, on the back of her tongue, in her heart. She is heavy, and cold, weighted down by darkness. She feels the surf pounding with every beat of her heart, growing slower, deeper, until it pounds through every inch of her body.

That is when the voice comes. It is not the same she heard before, a hiss that rose over the screams of the dying and the clash of metal on the battlefield. In it is a different kind of cruelty, a different kind of cold. In her mind, Éowyn sees a flash of dark hair floating like weeds in a pond, eyes of starless night, of ocean-bottoms. The woman smiles, and reaches out.

When she wakes she coughs up a lungful of seawater onto the bedcovers. The sensation is so vivd, so _real,_ that for a long moment she spreads her hands over the coverlet, baffled to find it dry. Éowyn is still not sure whether the woman in her dreams is reaching towards her to drag her deeper beneath the surface, or reaching to pull her into the air.

Now when she sleeps, Éowyn is ready. She sinks into the waves of the dream and sharpens her mind to a wicked point, a blade with which to defend herself. _I am not afraid._ But there is nothing for her to strike at, and her words fall into an emptiness that grows, deep inside her.

 _Good._ The reply comes like an echo. _That will make this easier._

The new dreams begin not long after that.

 

At first there is only darkness, and a voice which speaks words Éowyn cannot understand. She feels them crawling on the inside of her palm, making her fingers twitch like a puppet’s. The voice sounds as if it is coming from far away, under water, struggling to be understood.

The first solution is obvious. Éowyn stops herself from sleeping. But sleep is always waiting like an undertow to drag her under. It takes her at the desk in her chambers, as she bows over a drawing of a distant tower upon an island she has never seen, smoke rising from its dome. It creeps upon her as she sits in the garden, Faramir speaking of the beauty of Gondor’s spring. In the moments when she tells herself she is only resting her eyes, it pours into her until she is overwhelmed. And waiting underneath it is the voice, the ocean, the dark figure cut against the grey storm clouds of the sky.

“You are gone,” Éowyn shouts over the gale. “You cannot hurt me.”

The figure laughs, wavers like a reflection on disturbed water. “If you believe that, Lady of Rohan, then what are you afraid of?”

Éowyn sets her jaw. “I am not afraid of you.” It is not wholly a lie.

Rain shoots down like arrows. Éowyn can scarcely see. “I could teach you many things about the wisdom of fearing what rightfully should be feared.”

Éowyn laughs. “And did you fear me, before I ended you?”

“I was ended long before you put a blade to me.”

The figure at the top of the cliff shimmers once again. One moment, the Angmar stands with his iron crown and his tattered robes whipping about him in a gale.

And the next—

Dark hair, darker eyes, and a gown already soaked with seawater. The woman raises her hand, and at once Éowyn looks away—the ring that sits on her finger shines with something other than radiance, cutting into her eyes as sharply as a knife.

When she turns back, her eyes open on her own chamber again. But the dream lingers on, a throbbing pain behind her eyes, a tingle over her skin. And the words, branded into her mind— _Did you truly believe you were the first to trade your name for a sword?_

Éowyn lies motionless for a long time, her heart pounding in her breast. _Yes_ , the darkness whispers inside of her. _I did._

For a moment, Éowyn misses the presence of fear. Something else has taken its place, as heavy and immovable as a stone dropped into her heart. Her fingers twitch on the covers, tapping out the thought again and again: _not alone, not alone, not alone._

Once more, the dreams change. Now Éowyn is sucked down, not beneath the ocean but into something darker and colder. She is funneled into memories that do not belong to her, smeared across the span of a hundred lifetimes. Angmar was not always as she was when Éowyn met her on the battlefield. Once she was a woman, and then she was something else—and only over time was she stretched by the passage of time, scraped and dried like a hide by the ever-present weight on her finger.

She is—

—Riding across a landscape that stretches out to forever, the ring on her finger burning like a brand. Her wild laugh tears the night air moments before the arrow grazes her cheek—she captures the woman who fired it alive, and cannot help but love her for a short, mortal lifetime.

—A keep in a land the color of a sunset sky, dark eyes and jeweled lips and a poisoned cup held to Éowyn ’s lips. Its taste is bitter on her tongue even as she spits it out, and drives a knife through her would-be murderess’s heart that she feels within her own.

—A bedchamber, a sense of home, dark stone pressing in—a face in the darkness laughing, bobbing like a candle flame about to go out. The weight of something on her body, the slide of lips down her throat, the sense of being worked apart like a stubborn knot, someone else’s fingers inside of her.

And then, the dagger plunging into her back. It misses her heart, a foolish, careless mistake borne by a lovesickened hesitation. It saves Éowyn ’s life. Her lover’s is forfeit. This is the dream that plays over and over, until the pleasure and pain are dissolved into one.

Éowyn yanks herself out of the dream with the taste of that final dream on her lips, blood and sweat and the sweetness of another’s flesh on her tongue. She wakes, drenched in sweat, writhing with fever that lifts from her waking eyes like a flock of birds into the night. It is only the wound, the dark tendrils that move beneath her skin like sunlight dappling through water. The ache between her thighs, the wetness there, means nothing, is nothing.

“I do not believe that I am fully healed,” she says in the garden one day. Faramir sits with her in companionable silence, the pair of them nursing their separate injuries. Yet Éowyn has seen the soldiers that lay on their cots even now, wreathed in the smell of rot. She knows there are different kinds of healing, different wounds.

Faramir looks at her with measured concern. “Is there something that still ails you? The healers here are skilled.” His eyes settle on her arm.

Éowyn has nothing to say. The sling is gone. There is no pain. And yet she has grown thinner, paler, as if pieces of her are being sucked away from the inside, sequestered in some secret places where even Éowyn cannot find them.

She hides her wounded arm—her _infected_ arm, part of her corrects, a babble of mental sound she cannot repress—under the sleeves of her gown, and does not speak of the nights she wakes up wracked with terror and ecstasy, as wet as if she had crawled from the sea.

She will fight this alone. But she does not know how.

 

She goes walking at night, when she cannot stay still for fear of falling asleep. The corridors of Minas Tirith are pale and ghostly things, and she drifts down them feeling very much the ghost. Fresh air brushes her face at last. The archway to the garden rises before her. The moon is high tonight, casting everything in the shades of pearl and deep ocean water. From the city, a hush has fallen. Faramir will not be waiting for her here tonight.

Éowyn steps through the gates—

—and into the dead city.

The ground beneath her feet is of polished stone, a courtyard with no grass or trees. Statues loom on pedestals, surrounded by pools where water once might have run—but they are still and empty now, or so it seems. Everywhere is silence so thick it lies like dust. For a moment, Éowyn cannot move.

 _This is not real._ But she takes one step and then another, and the vision does not break.

“It is real,” another voice says, and in spite of herself Éowyn feels a prickle of fear travel down her back. “Although you are not here.” The voice is familiar, yet different—the rasp of wind and metal has been smoothed away; there is cruelty in it still, and yet a deep, weary sorrow that sound in measure.

Éowyn turns. The figure stands near one of the statues, a hand trailing the polished stone. Its back is to Éowyn , a dark cloak spilling over its armored shoulders onto the ground. It seems to sway, to drift as if in a strange wind that Éowyn cannot feel. Angmar is crownless now, in contrast to the statues. Their crowns are high and proud, but the faces are indistinct, worn away.

“I knew this place well in life,” the figure muses. “I grew pain here in lieu of flowers.” The voice is Angmar’s, seared into Éowyn ’s memory. Yet when the figure turns, it is the woman’s face that Éowyn looks upon, dark and haunted. Something in Éowyn goes still. She never had a mirror during her time as Dernhelm, and there was neither time nor inclination for vanity. This is the first time she has ever truly seen a woman in armor, and the sight makes the pounding from deep inside her stir like a massive heartbeat.

“Who are you?” Éowyn asks. Her voice has become a whisper too, clothed in susurrations just as Angmar’s is the stirrings of the tides.

The woman smiles. “Do you see me differently now, Éowyn ?” she asks. “I will give you one final gift: my name is Tar-Míriel , Queen of Numenor. You may see for yourself what joy such titles brought me.”

Darkness rolls over the stone courtyard. When Éowyn looks up, it is not the sun she sees—instead, the surface of the water rolls and wavers like a sheet of beaten silver, far above. Something massive passes between them, some slow, underwater thing, oblivious to their presence. The drowned city belongs to it and its own now. All at once, Éowyn realizes that she needs to breathe.

She inhales—

—and is sitting up on the seat where she had paused to rest, the dry itch of exhaustion still clinging to the insides of her eyes. Outside, the sky is dark—when has it ever been day? She cannot recall a time when she awoke to the morning light. It seems the sun itself has stopped rising. She presses her hands to her eyes as if she can knead the sleep away, then yanks them back just as quickly. She cannot close her eyes, cannot risk sleep again. The dreams are coiling closer and closer every night, and she finds they do not frighten her like she knows they should.

Instead, she rises and drifts through the halls of Minas Tirith like smoke from an extinguished torch, following her feet until they lead her where she knew she would eventually go—to the library where Gondor’s cache of history molders away in the dark, scroll after scroll rolled up and whispering fading words into themselves. The doors are unlocked, and she walks to the exact shelf and draws out the exact scroll with an ease that makes her think she’s still in a dream. The names of dead queens stare back at her from the paper’s surface, an age of dead women dried and sifted into a few lines of text each.

Éowyn finds the name she’s looking for quickly enough. _Tar-Míriel , 3116-3319. M. Ar-Pharazon and ceded her Scepter to Him. Final queen of Numenor Before the Fall._ Éowyn stares at the writing for a long time, but no spark of intuition leaps from the page to her. She cannot trace the thread of a life that begins here, in these dusty words spanning the sea and the fall of a kingdom. She knows only that her heart gives a sudden sickening lurch at Ar-Pharazon’s name, a twisting deep inside herself she realizes is hatred.

When she looks down again, her hands have been busy. The entry under Tar-Míriel ’s name has been smudged into nothingness, wiped from existence. Éowyn ’s fingers are ink stained, as dark and shiny as beetles. She puts the scroll away, and tries to conjure the guilt that she knows she should be feeling.

 

The dreams arrive as regularly as waves, breaking over her head one after another. She wanders flooded corridors. She slips into memories that are not her own, fragments centuries old and told from a stranger’s eyes. Míriel ’s history unfolds inside of her, episode by episode. And always the dreams return to the bedchamber, the stranger who smiles with kindness in her eyes, and the sudden agony of the knife, so sharp it could almost be a pang of joy.

“Do you understand now?”

The voice comes from behind, or simply from a place that Éowyn cannot perceive. She is back in the bedroom, the room where once Míriel was happy—but she stands there as herself, as Éowyn , and there is no one else. The bed stands like a dark altar, the sheets unmarred, forsaken.

“No man could kill me. That was my lord’s gift to me.” This time, the voice comes from directly behind her. Éowyn spins around, and Míriel stands before her—dressed in the robes she might have worn in a kingdom long ago, rather than the armor she died in. Éowyn blinks, staring at the woman who carved a swath of terror and destruction over the face of Middle Earth. She is beautiful—even dead, even drowned.

“A poor protection, it seems,” Éowyn says at last. “You are still dead.”

Míriel laughs. “I beg to differ. It protected me from the indignity of being killed by a man.” The fabric of her dress is wet with sea water, clinging to the plane of her ribs and stomach, collarbones jutting like bared teeth. Éowyn cannot help the way her eyes travel over Míriel ’s form. If it is a dream, she should not be able to blush. And yet this dream is contained with a memory, and the memories in this room ripple like heat in the air. When she’s asleep, Éowyn holds Míriel ’s memories inside of her like pictures in a closed book. Staring at the woman before her now, she can feel them flutter, the pages whipping by. From the smile that spreads over Míriel ’s lips as slow as honey, she knows Míriel can feel them too.

“We have much in common, you and I,” she says. She steps forward. Éowyn does not back away, cannot back away, even when the darkness of Míriel ’s eyes seems to grow and unfold like a dark flower. “You do not need to fight me. I wish you no harm.”

“Harm is all you are capable of,” Éowyn says, but she cannot summon the venom behind her words. Míriel takes another step. She is close now, very close. Éowyn can smell the salt of her, so very much like sweat. The room is getting smaller, or perhaps only more immediate.

Míriel ’s eyes darken. “I could have killed you, daughter of Rohan. Even now, I could become a poison in your veins.” She reaches a hand up to traces the contours of Éowyn ’s face, brushing as lightly as the touch of a spider’s web. “But that is not what I want. And I believe we want the same thing.”

Éowyn stares at her, struggling to feel anger, fear, disgust. She feels only the beat of the ocean inside of her, heavy and rhythmic. She wishes she was stronger than this. She wishes—she _wants_ —

“Why me?” she whispers against Míriel ’s palm.

Míriel smiles again. Another blink—this time, Éowyn is on the battlefield once again, but the smell of carrion and excrement and death is like a song in her blood, and she is staring at her own face through a veil of shadow. Her hands tighten on the flail in her hands, ready to crush the figure before her from existence. But then the pain in her back, so familiar and so agonizing, and the puny mortal removes her helmet—the strange sensation of being two places at once, of watching herself from the outside while feeling her own motions from within—and Éowyn herself is revealed.

What she feels next is all Míriel , the flash of it before Éowyn ’s sword comes rushing for her like a flash of lightening. The realization, as Míriel stares into Éowyn ’s eyes— _this is a good death_. Éowyn shivers at the warmth of the thought, the awful contentment that attaches itself to her.

But Míriel has not died. Éowyn carries her on.

Why?

Darkness settles in around her. The dream begins to change. She feels, rather than sees, Míriel smile one last time.

_I will show you why._

A sensation like a sudden gasp for breath, the feeling of relief, of something flooding in. And then Éowyn is standing on the shore of the sea, an utterly flat horizon before her. A glow is rising in the west, but it is not the setting sun. It is the light of something coming closer. The tide is coming in.

_You were my worthy death. You could have been so much more._

This time, Míriel ’s voice is human. As if on instinct, the sound of it sends something quivering through Éowyn ’s being, like a string plucked on a lyre. She trembles. She cannot move. The waters rise over her feet, spilling and tumbling in an unquenchable stream, rushing towards something far behind her that she cannot turn to see. On the edge of Éowyn ’s perception is the other outcome, the opposite side of the coin. Éowyn fails. Míriel lives. And Éowyn is borne away to dark rooms she no longer fears, and Míriel devours her in a way too delicious to resist.

 _I was already within you long before we met on the battlefield. Our hearts are the same._ The water heaves upwards, climbing Éowyn ’s calves, running over the backs of her knees. It is warm, as strong as muscles heaving against her body, as soft as the silk of bedsheets remembered from an era ago. Éowyn feels sweat leaping up over the bare skin of her body, her breathing growing fast.

 _You understand,_ Míriel whispers. _You know why I made myself._

The water laps up Éowyn ’s thighs, and she feels her knees grow weak. The heat inside her is unbearable. The waves surge past her, through her, between her legs, against her sex—she groans as it engulfs her in its heat and presence, filling her, overwhelming her. It beats against her, swallowing her belly, her breasts, her neck. As it closes in over her head she feels the first trembles of completion building in her toes, a wave which crests but never breaks.

Late in the night, Éowyn awakens in bed with a fever budding behind her eyes. She licks lips as cracked and dry as rinds of salt, and pushes the covers from her body slick with sweat. Her feet pitch and yaw beneath her, attuned to the deck of a distant ship. She makes it to the door—she slides down the wall of the hallway, her breathing a rattle of dry things in her chest. She needs the fresh air. Something in her arm constricts, a hand seizing her from the inside and squeezing.

 

The healers find her in the morning, slumped against a wall near the door to the gardens. Éowyn feels herself lifted, hears their voices of alarm, and then the press of a familiar cot on her back. _No._

“I must not sleep,” she tries to say, but her words have rotted out of her open mouth. A cool hand presses to her forehead, a voice murmuring to be still. Éowyn obeys without choice.

“Why do you fight me?” Míriel asks. The images that flash through Éowyn ’s mind are fevered and unreal. Ships tugging at their moorings in a half-deserted harbor, then taking flight into the air. A man standing upon an altar beneath a black dome, aflame, unscreaming, standing still as his flesh dissolves. A room without doors, whose roof stretches so high above that Éowyn cannot see it, can only feel the gaze of something cold and merciless beaming down on her from above.

“Because you are my enemy,” Éowyn says, and from far away she feels her lips moving.

 _My lady? My lady, can you hear me? Return to us, Éowyn , or be lost in the darkness!_ Yet the voice cannot call her back this time. For Éowyn is consumed with something more than the cold, a sickness with its roots in herself.

“That is not what I wish to be to you.”

“Yet it is what you are, and you cannot change it.”

Míriel pauses. “Perhaps a more pleasant dream would sweeten your mood towards me.”

The dreams solidify from the shape of Míriel ’s voice. All at once: _home_.

Edoras is lit as if aflame, torches burning in every brazier, pouring out light and warmth. The air smells of mead and sweat and good food, spiced with laughter. The feast is for her, she knows with a dream’s sort of knowing. She has returned home a hero, and is honored as such. Not a wife, not a maiden, not a prize. Her sword is on her belt, and none may take it from her.

“Hail!” the figures cry, their glasses raised as one. Their eyes are warm with pride and respect. They see her as she is, as she has always been. Not a caged thing, to be treated with wary affection. A warrior.

It is not real, of course.

Éowyn feels the tears beginning in her eyes, the sharp sting of shame. Of all Míriel ’s visions, this is the one that feels most truly like a dream. She cannot even believe in the illusion of it. Cannot imagine it happening, even in a fantasy.

All at once, the sound and motion ceases. Éowyn is suspended in a frame as still as a painting, the faces of those she knows and love frozen in their adoration of her. They do not see her tears. They see nothing at all.

“Why do you weep?”

Éowyn turns away, knowing that Míriel is everywhere yet unable to still the impulse to hide her grief.

“I admit, it is an unlikely outcome,” Míriel continues. She steps into Éowyn ’s line of sight, standing beside Eomer’s frozen form. Míriel inspects his face as if scrutinizing a complicated scroll. “But I thought perhaps it might please you better than the faces of dead fools, and the drowned city they died in.”

“I am not so easily placated by fantasies,” Éowyn says, wiping her cheeks fiercely.

“You cannot lie to me, Éowyn . For your whole life you have eaten dreams keep from starving, though they only increased your hunger. It was the same with me.”

“I have won my glory. You cannot make me forget that.”

Míriel is quiet. “Glory,” she muses at last. “A strange thing. It lasts only as long as they remember your name.” Her eyes turn to Éowyn . “How will you be remembered, I wonder? I can only hope your legacy will bear the years better than my own.”

“I am not like you,” Éowyn says, but she knows that it is a lie.

Míriel smiles. “Ah, but something in you recognizes me, does it not? Just as I recognize you. That was what let me linger on: the foothold was there already. I held on, and you let me. Shall I show you why?”

The dream changes once again. She is seated upon a throne, its seat hard and stiff beneath her back. At times, the room before her is the central hall at Edoras—other times, the throne room in Gondor. And sometimes, for brief moments, it is a place Éowyn knows not at all. Somewhere large and dark and full of dust, drifting through the air on sluggish currents. The room is deserted, ringing with emptiness.

Éowyn tries to rise, and cannot. She is riveted in place. She is wearing no clothes. Her skin rises with gooseflesh, yet she feels only a strange, feverish heat.

“I know what it is you feel.” Míriel steps from the shadows across the hall, cruising out of the darkness with the sleek elegance of some underwater creature. She looks up at Éowyn and smiles, an expression that sends a shiver down her spine against the stone of her seat. “What it is you want.”

“I want nothing from you,” Éowyn says, but her own voice does not convince her.

Míriel drifts closer, her armor making no sound. She pauses at the foot of the dais and looks up at Éowyn with a wry expression. “Do you not?” she whispers. “Well. There is much that I want of _you_ , shieldmaiden.”

Éowyn cannot breathe. There is something heavy in her lungs, making her head go light and unbalanced. “Tell me,” she says, as if the throne at her back has given her the power to command. “What do you want of me, so that you might leave me in peace?”

“You do not want peace,” Míriel said. Her eyes meet Éowyn ’s with a challenge. “There is only one thing more your heart desires, and what I want is to give it to you.”

Éowyn feels her heart contract. She knows what it is she is about to ask for, knows that she should not. All along, she has known. And yet.

She asks anyways.

“Show me,” Éowyn whispers.

Tar-Míriel ascends the steps to the dais. The smile on her lips is smug as she stops before Éowyn ’s throne. Still, Éowyn cannot move—she is not sure that she wants to. Míriel falls to one knee before her, a parody of respect. Her hands reach out to settle on Éowyn ’s bare knees. She has not removed her armor—the gauntlets are like claws settling over Éowyn ’s skin, light enough not to break the surface, sharp enough to prickle. They stroke over the skin, sending waves of sensation traveling up Éowyn ’s thighs. Her toes curl in spite of herself. It does not go unobserved.

“You see?” Míriel murmurs, letting one gauntlet travel feather-light over the top of Éowyn ’s thigh. Éowyn shivers in what could be either anticipation or fear. “You know what it is you want of me. You have wanted it ever since you saw my true face.”

“I could say the same of you,” Éowyn manages, though her voice is tight in her throat. Miril’s hands continue their slow exploration of her skin, the sharp points leaving thin white lines in their wake. “You were the one who sent me those dreams. You were the one who drove me to this.”

“Is that how you would prefer to think of it? I am very familiar with the ways in which a narrative can change in hindsight.” Míriel leans forward, putting more of her weight on her hands. The gauntlets dig into Éowyn ’s legs, just shy of painful, yet she hardly feels them. Míriel ’s lips are before her, and they are still smiling a mocking smile. “Would you like me to take you?” she murmurs. “Would you like to feel my power, and know yourself helpless against it?”

At once, Éowyn can move. Anger is the key that unlocks her limbs. She surges forward, seizes Míriel ’s mouth under her own and kisses her hard enough to bruise.

The other woman laughs even as Éowyn presses closer. “I thought not,” she murmurs against Éowyn ’s lips, moments before pulling back. The pressure on one of Éowyn ’s legs is gone—Míriel raises her hand before Éowyn ’s face. “Remove my gauntlet.” She holds her hand between them, a dark, inhuman claw. Éowyn hesitates only a moment before fumbling with the clasps She has come too far to stop, now. She no longer wants to.

Míriel slips her hand free, tosses the gauntlet to the side with a clatter. Her fingers are long and slim. Míriel wastes no time. She slips her fingers between Éowyn ’s legs, and pushes in.

The sensation is so sudden that Éowyn cannot help but gasp. She twists, feeling Míriel ’s fingers inside of her, a pressure and sweetness like a spark about to catch. The strange gravity is back at work—she cannot move, and hardly wants to. Míriel watches her face as she works her fingers, the slow, satisfied smile returning.

“You’re wet,” she whispers. “Have you been craving me, Éowyn ?”

“You’ve given me little choice,” Éowyn breathes, though it is not strictly true. She has chosen this. She has _wanted_ it.

Míriel ’s other hand, the one that still wears the gauntlet, begins tracing over Éowyn ’s breasts. The sensation is so sharp it is almost painful as the pointed tips slide over her nipples, yet the frantic rise and fall of her chest only pushes Míriel further. Míriel ’s other hand never ceases in its movement, dipping inside of her only to pull back and massage its slow circles until Éowyn thinks that this must be what death feels like. The gauntlet rises to Éowyn ’s throat, draws a thin line down her jugular. Míriel ’s lips follow it, sucking a line of bruises down to Éowyn ’s clavicle, then chasing the sweat that beads on her sternum down to her breasts. Éowyn moans as Míriel begins to suck, and does not care that it echoes so loudly in the vast spaces of the throne room.

“Your sweat tastes of the sea,” Míriel murmurs into her skin. The points of her gauntly squeeze Éowyn ’s side. “I’d like to taste you more.”

Éowyn can only nod, her head bobbing helplessly as Míriel ’s head slides lower. One hand retreats and settles on her hip, as the gauntlet settles on the other—Éowyn ’s body is tugged forward with effortless strength, tilting her hips upwards. Míriel meets her eye one last time as she lowers herself between Éowyn ’s knees, that same smile fixed on her lips.

When she leans forward and drags her tongue over Éowyn ’s sex, for a moment the entire ocean itself is poured through Éowyn ’s center. She cannot breathe, cannot think. She can only feel Míriel touching her, tasting her, driving her closer to the edge.

Every time Éowyn feels herself begin to spill, Míriel pulls away. Her lips move to the inside of Éowyn ’s thighs, peppering her skin with bites that send shoots of pain and arousal through Éowyn ’s being. She tangles her hand in Míriel ’s hair and lets her legs wrap tighter around Míriel ’s shoulders. The throne room is empty and silent, but Éowyn could not have cared if it were full of the entire court of Gondor itself. She will not stop this. She needs it more than she has needed anything in her life.

“Do you wish to find release?” Míriel whispers, pausing to drag her tongue over the wetness on Éowyn ’s thighs. “Do you know what you want from me now?”

“Yes,” Éowyn gasped, trying to yank Míriel by the hair back to where she needs her. “Yes, Míriel , please, I do, I need it, I need you to—Ah!” At once, Míriel ’s mouth settles over the sharpest point of sensation between Éowyn ’s legs, at the same moment that her bare fingers slide inside her once more. They work in tandem, pulling Éowyn apart from inside and out. Éowyn feels the beating of her climax like vast waves breaking on rocks, pounding until there is nothing left, until she is crushed into nothing but salt and spray.

Afterwards, she sits limply on the throne as Míriel pulls back, wiping her mouth with the back of her free hand. “Good,” she whispers, cupping Éowyn ’s cheek with her gauntlet. The metal is as cold as ice, but Éowyn presses her feverish flesh to it all the same. She leans forward again, and this time the kiss she presses to Éowyn ’s lips is chaste, slow, ponderous. When she pulls back, she looks into Éowyn ’s eyes the way the sun looks into the bottom of the sea.

“Tell me, Éowyn ,” she whispers. “Do you still wish to vanquish me? Do you still wish to see me gone?”

Slowly, wordlessly, Éowyn shakes her head.

“I thought not,” Míriel says. “Then I will be here, within you.” She lifts Éowyn ’s hand to her lips, brushes a kiss over it. She dissolves into the arm like a shadow wheeling before the sun, like a blade sliding back into its sheath.

 

The words are an echo on the edge of Éowyn ’s mind as she rises from the dream at last. She opens her eyes in an empty chamber, her body wasted away beneath her, yet full of a feverish strength. Outside of her window, morning sunlight pours onto the stone floor of her chamber. Éowyn feels the sheen of sweat on her body, the ache in her injured hand growing fainter by the moment. She presses her fingers to her lips and tastes the salt. The heartbeat that throbs within them is just slightly off-beat to her own. She is not afraid anymore. Is this how the fall begins? Is this how Míriel was taken?

Éowyn remembers the wave, just as she remembers the darkness of Edoras that closed in around her. No. The fall began much earlier. Perhaps this is merely the inevitable destination.

Éowyn leans back in the pillows, and closes her eyes once more. The sensation in her arm curls deliciously in response. When her caretakers return, she will tell them she is healed.


End file.
